Related papers: Persuaded Search
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…
A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…
We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…
I study a principal-agent model in which a principal hires an agent to collect information about an unknown continuous state. The agent acquires a signal whose distribution is centered around the state, controlling the signal's precision at…
We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search…
How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…
We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes…
How should a buyer design procurement mechanisms when suppliers' costs are unknown, and the buyer does not have a prior belief? We demonstrate that simple mechanisms - that share a constant fraction of the buyer utility with the seller -…
We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, chooses whether to acquire a private signal (and its precision), and then…
I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…
As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…
This paper extends the sequential search model of Wolinsky (1986) by allowing firms to choose how much match value information to disclose to visiting consumers. This restores the Diamond paradox (Diamond 1971): there exist no symmetric…
We study how a principal can jointly shape an agent's timing and action through information. We develop a revelation principle: with intertemporal commitment, the problem simplifies to choosing a joint distribution over stopping times and…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
Motivated by agentic markets -- two-sided markets in which consumers and businesses are assisted by AI tools that facilitate consumers' search -- we study the impact of improved search technology on learning and welfare in markets. We put…
We study equilibria in two-buyer sequential second-price (or first-price) auctions for identical goods. Buyers have weakly decreasing incremental values, and we make a behavioural no-overbidding assumption: the buyers do not bid above their…
We consider a model of oligopolistic competition in a market with search frictions, in which competing firms with products of unknown quality advertise how much information a consumer's visit will glean. In the unique symmetric equilibrium…
Firms increasingly delegate decisions to learning algorithms in platform markets. Standard algorithms perform well when platform policies are stationary, but firms often face ambiguity about whether policies are stationary or adapt…
In this paper, we study sequential auctions with two budget constrained bidders and any number of identical items. All prior results on such auctions consider only two items. We construct a canonical outcome of the auction that is the only…